Stuck

Summer’s officially over as of today. I’m so glad. And yet…

…Every year about this time, I feel a deep lassitude creeping over me; I don’t want to do anything. I get a sluggishness during the last days of Summer; a lethargy, a weariness to be done with all the enforced fun of June, July and August, along with an apprehension about the end of the growing season. Put away the mowers, the grills, the weed-whackers, the garden hoses. Pull up the burnt-out annuals, rake up the mulch, turn the compost pile. Mark the spots where the summer bulbs lie, so they can be lifted at before the first freeze. Get rid of the pile of garden tools on the porch, and move them back to the basement. Yank up that brown cucumber vine, pick those last peppers and tomatoes, thin out those strawberry plants. Sweep the sidewalks. All this is yet to come, as I cannot do any of it right now. The sloth has penetrated too profoundly. I’m stuck.

I feel a boiling resentment toward retail merchants for allowing the warm wonderful Autumn-colored artifacts on their shelves to share space with the opulent reds and greens, golds and silvers of the distant Christmas holiday season. The bile rises in my throat as I try to admit both color families into my mind’s eye, and cannot; the two arrays clash and vie for attention equally, diminishing both. I find I can’t get energized about Autumn with the looming pressure of December’s holidays trying to divide my psyche—it’s too much color and too disparate. One is warm, the other chilled. One is wood-grain, leaf-mould, pumpkin and spice, the other is ice, glitter, crinkled shiny paper, sweet sugar icing. They don’t mesh and they don’t share—it’s like two warring mothers-in-law fighting over the same grandchild.

And all the color and growth in the front garden has begun to feel disproportionate and out-of-control. The alyssum, so petite, so frothy-white, has started to encroach on the sidewalk it is supposed to border; I must step over it to get to my front steps. The lemon grass, a tiny, compact little clump at the beginning of June, has now arched completely across my path and wets me with heavy dew every morning on my way to work, spoiling my clothes. The datura is still producing riots of huge yellow flowers, but the leaves are beginning to die off revealing stems in twisted haunted-house shapes, and testicle-shaped seed pods that hang from them. Like some grotesque group of flashers with huge bouquets in their arms, they dominate the front fence, but the blossoms have begun to turn their angelic faces away in embarrassment.

Morning glories that covered the porch-end with sweet purple and pink trumpets just a month ago, are now hanging yellow, bedraggled and thin, and have stopped blooming, almost infuriating me in their death throes, they are so hideous. They choked out my clematis, and now they droop on the lattice in revenge, dropping seeds into the ground so that next Spring I will be doing twice the work weeding them out. Sunflowers hunch over like whipped old men in ragged clothes. The zinnias are rusting on their tall stems, the celosia has bolted. It’s as if all the plants and flowers have bankrupted their energy in a rebellion of wild growth, overcompensation and ruinous, gluttonous excess. It makes me want to hack it all down with a machete. I find myself longing for the spareness and simplicity of bare branches, gray skies and winter wind.

And, as if to stem this raging tide of intemperance, the sun has begun to curtail its brightness. The days grow shorter. The morning light grows thinner. The nights are cooler, the skies are less luminously blue. It’s about time. Perhaps this languorousness will lift soon, and I can begin to cut things back, chop them down, dig them up and cover their roots; perhaps I can haul my summer accessories inside, clean and empty my mower, stow my tools. I need to swamp out my dusty, summer-muddled house. I need to sweep and wash and freshen, replace the greens and turquoises and magentas with ambers, golds, deep satisfying reds and toasty comforting browns.

This transition is short. Soon the color and passion of Autumn will give way and be replaced by first the holiday glitter, then the austerity of Winter, and there will again be an epoch to endure. After the Solstice, my impatience will begin to grow with the length of the daylight, until the grayness becomes irritating and I once again yearn for the tenderness of those first snowdrops, the first delicate blades of green grass pushing up through the brown, the first bright tulips and daffodils, bonnetlike blossoms nodding on gently-scented breezes, and the smells of a planet waking up from its long sleep. Until then, I’m stuck with this stopped clock, this molasses vitality that refuses to move, or do, or think, or plan. I can’t do anything yet.

I’m stuck.